from the start (this choice should have been my own)
by the space between stars
Summary: Kiera goes back to 2077. It's not her 2077. Still, she tries. "A mismatched cog from the wrong machine- this is what she has become. The last surviving fragment of a time long since erased from existence. The unwanted remainder of the universe."


A/N: I never finished watching the show.

From what I hear of its final season, that might be a good thing. It got far too convoluted to last much longer, anyhow.

This fic is a response to that, the post-script to the ending I wrote in my head, in which Kiera does hop timelines but ultimately returns to the future after dispatching the rest of Liber8 (and anyone else standing in the path of the future she swore to preserve) and ensuring that the course of history would mostly go unchanged.

I needed a resolution that wasn't overly complicated or tangled, so I made my own.

* * *

There have been so many timelines and so many lives that none of this feels like _her_ any longer.

In a way, none of it _is_ hers, not anymore.

She had lost the right to belong _anywhere_ the moment she stepped into that execution chamber.

There was no going back to the future- her past.

Not after they'd gone and trampled a million little butterflies, sent a million little ripples through time, a million little waves building up into a tsunami of change that would swallow up everything she'd ever known and everyone she'd ever loved.

They will still be there when she returns- some things, it seems, remain constant through time.

But not hers.

Never hers.

The world had woven itself so well around the hole that she'd left that it was as if she'd never existed at all.

* * *

Alec is waiting for her, when she finally does make it to 2077.

(She doesn't dare call it home because it simply _isn't_.)

The lines of his face tell stories of the decades that she's simply skipped, dancing through time the way only a person completely untethered could so easily do.

He looks at her with ageless eyes, and offers her everything at his disposal- clothes, currency, housing, food.

Every luxury denied to the ordinary denizens of the time she was once a part of is at her fingertips now. Every little thing she'd marveled over when she'd first arrived in the past- in her future- is at her fingertips now- and it's almost funny how these privileges pale in comparison to all that she's lost.

Alec understands this- and perhaps, that is why he offers them.

Nothing will ever quite make up for the sacrifices she's had to make, but these vague comforts at least allow her to pretend that she's won something, gained something out of all of this pain.

(Isn't that how it's supposed to work?

The hero returns from the quest and is rewarded for all the hardships they'd endured?

Happily ever after, right?

She drowns the cynical laughter that bubbles in her chest with a mouthful of amber liquid that strips her throat raw and leaves her seething in silence.)

* * *

She never thought she'd despise the skyline of the home she'd so longed to return to, but the sight of it makes her sick enough to order the windows to go black, to shut out everything she can no longer bear to see.

Alec makes sure that she wants for nothing- or, at least, he tries.

The one thing she wants is something he can never grant her, not even with all the resources at his disposal.

(It is the one thing he had been the one to take away from her in the first place- _choice_.

If she had known that her life would end the moment she had signed up to become a CPS officer, she would have never signed the digital, dotted line.)

She accepts his help quietly, though she keeps her gaze locked to the floor when he visits.

There are things in her eyes that she can no longer hide, not from herself, and certainly not from him.

The accusation that burns in her blood, stains her sleep, scorches the very marrow of her bones-

 _Why?_

Kiera is no stranger to sacrifice, but this has been slaughter, and she, the unwitting lamb sentenced to bleed even before her birth.

Besides, she already knows the answer-

 _For the good of the many._

It doesn't stop her from wishing she'd been part of the _many_ instead.

(She understands her sister so much better now.

Better to live in the memory of an unsullied past than face the weight of a splintering present.)

* * *

The streets of the city are so achingly familiar and yet- _not_.

Something in her chest breaks just a tiny bit more at this realization, little shards of her heart turning to ash and slipping through the spaces between her bones; her body's motions become robotic as she retreats into the depths her mind.

People stare as she walks past- it seems as if even anonymity will be denied her.

She doesn't blame them.

She is different, and they can sense it.

She doesn't belong.

A mismatched cog from the wrong machine- this is what she has become.

The last surviving fragment of a time long since erased from existence.

The unwanted remainder of the universe.

She leaves, makes a hasty, tactical retreat to the confines of the lavish penthouse SadTech had gifted her, where the warm burn of alcohol soothes the jagged edges of wounds that will never heal.

Many things have changed, too many to count, at this point- but the weight of alcohol in her veins is not among them.

* * *

Putting her hand through the bathroom mirror doesn't even leave a scar.

Alec frowns down at her as the nanites stitch her skin closed, flawlessly erasing every trace of injury. Nothing remains- not even a trace of red across her knuckles where the flesh had first split upon contact with the mirror's polished surface.

He is her senior in this time, but she is still older than him in so many ways, older and wearier than she has any right to be, given the fact that her biological age puts her decades below his.

"You could've just told me you preferred another style of interior decorating, Kiera," he admonishes teasingly, trying his best to lighten the mood.

(As if it would be so easy to slip back into the easy camaraderie they'd forged at the start of all this- the beginning of her end, the end of his beginning.

Still, they pretend.)

She manages to feign a half-hearted smile in response.

It is the kind of smile that wouldn't even fool the blind.

"Minimalism is boring," she agrees, flexing her newly healed hand, and that is the end of that.

* * *

Kiera Cameron has been _many_ things, both pawn and queen in a game of chess that has been stretched out through the very fabric of time itself.

She has only ever wished to be _one_ -

 **Free**.

The universe, as always, steadfastly continues to ignore her pleas.

In the end, this is why she takes her story- the story written by everyone _but_ the one person it was meant to be about- into her own hands and sets fire to the damned pages with a single step.

(That's all it takes to follow her sister's rabbit hole of a path into nothingness.)

A single step, taken during the absolute stillness of an early morning in the outskirts of the city she'd grown to love and hate in warring measures within her fragile, half-torn heart.

She lets herself go with arms outstretched, caught somewhere between flight and fall until gravity overpowers her precarious balance on the edge of the roof and everything ends the way it had started so long ago-

With screams that are not hers and a bright light that drags her into quiet, sterile oblivion.

(This time, however, she does not resist its call.

She goes willingly, relishing the freedom of choice that, for the first- and last- time, is not an illusion.)

 _~ fin ~_

* * *

A/N: Before anyone starts shouting in the comments, yes, I did write an alternate ending for this piece, and yes, I might post it as a continuation of this story.

Leave a review, salute our favorite Protector.


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